The gas spread everywhere around the gymnasium like the black plague of the fore years, and emergency teams were being sent to help the victims. A few humans crawled out of the gym, Gill being among them. They were all coughing horribly and terribly, and seemed to be in terrible pains. And, after a few moments, the humans fell to the ground, signaling the morphing. There were colts and fillies around the area, and the adults were hard pressed to grab them and cover their eyes and ears. All the humans were beginning to transform...all, but one. Gill was still on his knees. He was coughing tremendously and felt like he was about to vomit, but the magma never exited the cone of the volcano. After finally getting a hold of himself, the man stood back up, although in a bit of pain.
"Agh. That gas tastes horrible and burns like the gas used to knock you out during surgical operations. Ow." Gill said as he stretched a bit. While twisting his head, he saw his fellow humans morphing into ponies. This is when he started to panic. "AAAAHHH!" he turned to face the other ponies who were staring at him in confusion. "You did this! Get the hell away from me!" he shouted as he pointed at every single figure in the crowd.
One of the security guards stepped forward. "How. How is it possible. How are you still a human?"
"Huh? Oh wait...you must be one of those psychos from the facility. Take this!" Gill shouted as he punted the security pony away. He then ran back towards his truck and unlocked the security on it and hopped inside. "You'll never turn me into one of you. Never! Get away! Leave me alone!"
The massive vehicle roared as it took off for the exits of the city. Some other security folk saw what happened and tried to catch Gill by flying near his truck or by creating blocking and using magic to hold the metal beast down, but to no avail. It just continued to charge out of the city in a big panic and expelling of gasses, with its driver as white as Celestia. He wouldn't stop, but this left quite an impression on those that saw that he didn't transform.
Back at the gymnasium, some members of the HLF had arrived with gas masks to see what had happened and saw the whole thing.
"Dude. Did you see that? He didn't change. Not one bit. Nothing. How the hell is that even possible? He was right at the center of the explosion! I saw him waltz out of there in the same way those others did."
There were emergency evacuation ponies outside of the gymnasium and taking those that had just finished transformation to the hospital, and the two humans were hiding behind a house while guards had arrived and receiving information from the security ponies.
"Hm. He might have an immunization. We need to tell the bossman. This could help us if he joined us in our fight against the PER. Besides, bossman is scary as fuck. If we give him this information-"
"Then he won't yell at us like he always does. Let's go!"
The two humans disappeared back into the shadows before a unicorn came by to see what the two strange shadows were. The pair went towards a long-since-closed restaurant whose door and windows were boarded up, and that had somehow sunk into the ground, and knocked on the door, opening yet another one underneath the two and sliding them all the way into the base of operations of the HLF. This placed was packed with people wearing diverse clothes and armor. There were several filters everywhere, and a few couches strewn about here and there while plants provided more fresh air than needed. Some were watching the T.V., others were watching old movies, while many more just talked together or were playing around. The room that the pair went into was filled wih computers, maps, heavily armed and armored soldiers, and the big boss.
"Hey, big boss. We got something real swell to tell you."
"Like how you failed to stop the bomb at the gymnasium?"
The big boss was the cliché of the rough rebel. His hair was blond, but it was short cut, and his eyes looked like ice. The blue was just the bright. He had a scar running from his head, with a few scars here and there on the rest of his cranium. Likely the effect of a shrapnel grenade. He wore a military costume, with heavy, ice-blue armor. He was known as the "Snowman". He took out a massive knife that could be considered a sword, from his belt, and slammed it on the wooden table, making one of the members who was the reading the map on it begin to curse and attempt to pull out the knife.
"Do to your stupidity, the human race has shrunk even more, and you cretins are about to devolve once I'm done beating the shit out of you."
"AAAAIT! This is important!"
"Hmph." the man lowered his fist and began to flex and crack every bone in his body. "You have one chance. If it is good enough, then I won't rip your arms off and shoe them up each other's ass."
The pair looked at each other in horror, although this was difficult to notice through their gas masks.
"Um...well..."
"We saw one of the victims...um, crawl out of the stadium and...well..."
"What is it? He exploded? Immediately turned into a pony?"
"Well...that's just it. He DIDN'T morph into a pony."
All activities went silent and every turned to stare at the pair, who started to shrink in nervousness.
"What do you mean by 'he didn't morph'?"
"We don't get it either, big boss. He was in the gymnasium, right in the center of the explosion, and he crawled out coughing with a few others."
"He even seemed to be in extreme pain."
"But, when the others started to morph, he just stood back up and coughed a bit more before screaming and accusing the ponies at the spot to be responsible for the calamity."
"Heheh. Then he kicked one o them away before boosting out of the city on a truck."
"WHAT?!" Snowman grabbed the two idiots by their neck-collars and lift them above the ground. "WHAT KIND OF TRUCK WAS IT?!"
"I-I-i think it w-was a blue M-Machback t-t-twenty fourteen. OOMF!" Snowman dropped them on the floor and smiled.
"Yes. Finally! If we can have him join our ranks, then we can extract a bit of his dna and create immunizations for the rest of us."
"Hell, we might even be able to create potions to reverse what has happened to fellow humans and deal with those damn PLR without worrying about shots from that damn potion." one of the heavily armored characters said.
"That's a great idea! You two." Snowman whipped back with a malicious frown on his face. "You know what he looks like and what his truck looks like perfectly. You will go with our scout teams and try and convince him to join our ranks. If you don't manage to convince him, force is always a useful alternative."
"Yes, sir!" the two shouted in synchronization after standing back up.
"Good. I'll prepare the team you'll be in and get the resources ready. Now get the HELL over to the operations room or I'll tear your brains out of your skulls and use THOSE to look for my information."
"Ahhh! Yes big boss!"
The idiots quickly scurried out of the room as three others came in with a tied-up green pony sporting a flashy vanilla mane and tail.
"Sir. We caught this member of the PLR."
"Hmph."
"You'll never get away with this. The PLR will ponify you in no time!"
"Anything you can tell us about your operations here?"
"No."
Snowman turned around and put his hands behind his back as he contemplated the possibilities. After a long moment of silence, he turned around with a gun in his and shot the pony right between the eyes at point-blank range.
"Peuh. He wouldn't have spoken anyways. Take this little shit away and put it in the meat-grinder for the dogs."
The road to get out of town was a long one, and, despite his insane amount of foods and drinks stocked in the truck, Gill needed a beer. He found, near the outskirts of the city, an old trucker's restaurant. He stopped near it, locked up his truck, and walked into the old fashioned place. Looking around, he was soothed by the sight of other humans here. The gas on him had long since dissipated, and the server was a weird old lady chewing gum, as per the traditional appearance f the lady taking the orders from the truckers.
"What'll it be?"
"Ya got any beer?"
"No. But we have a very powerful coffee. Whadda ya say?"
Gill passed his hand through his roughed up hair. His 'coif' had been torn apart by the insane amount of stress he bore in only just to days.
"Yes. Please. Thank you."
"That'll be two bits."
"Um...here you go." he said as he passed over two gold coins. "By the lord almighty. I'll never get used to this?"
"What's the matter?" a female voice said on the human's left.
"Nothing that you would believe."
"Try me."
"Fine. I was frozen in a stasis tube back in two thousand fifteen, and now I awoke just two days ago due to an error. My parents are certainly dead, my friends were killed in some weird accident, and the second I get out of the chamber, some weird PER assholes try and turn me into a pony! I just went into a gymnasium not two hours ago, to find a place, and the thing exploded with a weird gas that started to mutate everyone." Gill's voice started to crack as he held his head with his two hands and began to shake in fear and powerlessness. "I was the only one who didn't transform."
Luckily for Gill, the surrounding sounds prevented what he said from reaching further than his tiny area of dialogue.
"What? But...that's impossible! Even if you had pony dna, you should've become one of us! That stuff is magical."
"I don't believe in magic. I just believe in what is proven to me. And right now, I can't believe what is going on. What happened to this world? Why are ponies everywhere? Why are humans so reluctant to give away their past? Their bodies?! I'll never understand."
The man began to sob as he put his face between his hands. The person next to him put her hand on his arm and pushed it down.
"Hey now. It's alright. Maybe some of your friends are still around? Thirty years doesn't kill anypony by age."
"Thanks. I...Did you just say 'anypony'?"
Gill's heart began to race as he looked to his left and saw a purple mare looking at him kindly. Everything about her was purple. Her eyes were a deep astral purple, her coat was a silky dark purple, and her mane and tail looked like comfortable, overlapping layers of a wine purple. Her cutie mark, on the other hand, was a heart with a drop of blood dripping from it.
"AAAAAH!" he screamed as he fell of the stool and slid back against the wall further away. He was utterly terrified, and this caught the attention of everyone in the mini-restaurant.
"Wh-what's wrong?"
"Y-y-you're a pony? L-like all the others. Y-y-you're gonna turn me into one of you! St-stay away."
"What?! I wouldn't do something like that!" The purple unicorn mare jumped down he stool and started to walk towards Gill. Every clop on the ground seemed like tank was approaching the man, and that everything would end in seconds. "It's a choice you make. Not something you force on others."
"Yeah right. And then you're going to catch me off guard and stab me in the back with that purple substance that smells of ass, and my bones will crack in awful pains and others. Then I'll be reformed. Never a human again Never know the pleasures of having fingers again. Never being human." Gill began to shake terribly, so much that the windows on the wall behind him began to tremble slightly as well.
In fact, Gill was so panicked and mumbling the things that scared him so much, that he wasn't paying attention to the environment around him, and the mare took this opportunity to hug him and begin to hum a soothing tune, one that made the others tired and nearly pass out, but Gill, he was panicking too much, so the effect didn't happen right away as hoped. The unicorn continued, and started to rock the human gently from side to side. After about fifteen minutes, Gill began to calm down, but still continued to mumble, albeit almost quietly.
"There we go. See? I'm not going to hurt you You just need to see the world as it has become. You're just a bit lost."
"N-no. You're just trying to trick me."
"What can I do to gain your trust?"
"Nothing!"
"There has to be something!"
Suddenly, some ponies with a some fire-arms busted into the restaurant and aimed at everyone. It was the PER. A red mare stepped up.
"Alright, humans! Step up, and this will g painlessly. YOU there. Step aside."
"But, 's in a trauma. You can't just-"
The unicorn was tossed aside by another in the group, and held her down further away from the human.
"No! Leave him alone! You can't! He'll never recover."
"Then it'll be one less human to pollute the planet." the red mare said as she aimed for Gill's leg.
*tching* It hit him square in the arm. The mare backed away, expecting the obvious, but it didn't happen. She frowned a bit as she eyed the human in every part of his being.
"Must've been empty. Here's another."
It hit again, and again, nothing happened.
"Im...Impossible!"
"OW! The hell? What're you doing, shootin' people in the arm. Yeow! That hurts."
Gill pulled the darts out his arm. These ones weren't like the bullets from the facility. No. They were meant for quick morphing.
"Wait a minute...do I know you?"
"Y-you should. We're the the PER."
"PE...OH NO! GET THE FUCK AWAY!"
"HEY WATCH-"
The mare was picked up and thrown through a window, before Gill body slammed the other unsuspecting PER members. Instinctively, he picked up the purple mare without paying attention and ran back to his truck. He tossed the mare into his food pile and set the truck ablaze with speed, determined to get as far away from that place as possible. The chase was on, and the man got an unexpected companion simply out of fear. He accidentally dragged her along. How would this trip across da states fare?